To love and to serve

....to love the Lord your God and to walk in all His ways and to keep His commandments and to cling to and unite with Him and to serve Him with all your heart and soul [your very life]. Joshua 22:5 AMP

If you believe in God what do you mean when you say you love him and serve him? What is your definition of that? Does it mean you go to a church on Sunday mornings and maybe Wednesday nights? Is that what loving God and serving God means to you? Or is it more? Are you on a journey to figure out what it is still?
I love today's quote from the book of Joshua in the Bible. It indicates to me that loving God and serving him probably is defined best without including a church building/denomination/etc. When I look at today's quote and I read it with an open heart and mind and clear eyes I see that loving and serving God is defined by obeying all of his word, uniting myself to him, and allowing my life to be changed by his word. And when I say his word I mean his word not our version of his word or what we want his word to say because it's easier to "swallow". So part of loving and serving God is being open to his word and not our version of it. Another part of loving and serving him is clinging and uniting to him with all of us - our hearts, our soul, and our very lives. How do we do that? By allowing his word to be ours. Hmmmm. It all seems to come back to his word, why? Because his word is what reveals to us his character, his nature, his heart, his commandments for us. How we do love God and serve him? By walking, breathing, living out, and sharing his word.

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Butter someone up

There are two probable origins for this idiom and I think both are equally plausible. The first one is that when you spread butter on bread you are buttering it up like one would do when trying to flatter someone. The second is in ancient India there was a practice of throwing balls of butter at statues to ask for favor, i.e. buttering them up. ( source ) When we use the phrase today we generally mean that extreme flattery is used to gain information or favor. It's not always necessarily a compliment.

A dime a dozen

"It's said that in the year 1796, the first U.S. dimes were produced for circulation. Hence, it would make sense for this phrase to originate sometime after." Read more here . Today the phrase carries the meaning that something is cheap or without value if it can be lumped in with other similar or exactly-like things. It's more of an insult than anything.

Life according to van Gogh...sort of

There are two ways of thinking about painting, how not to do it and how to do it; how to do it -- with much drawing and little color; how not to do it -- with much color and little drawing. Vincent van Gogh in a l etter to Theo van Gogh, April 1882 Life is a little bit like today's quote from van Gogh. Some of us live life focusing on the drawing - the details - and have very little color. Others of us go for the color and forsake, to a degree, the drawing - the details. Unlike painting, according to van Gogh, one is not wrong over the other but somewhere in between the two would be the best I would think. If you look at some of van Gogh's paintings I feel like you can see where he might have struggled between the "how to do it" and the " how not to do it" (as he admittedly loved color so much but knew he had to focus more on the drawing) and that seems to be reflected in his life as well. In the end he wasn't able to find the ...

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